For every “good girl”, every “who wants a treat?” and every heart-to-heart conversation you have with your cat, researchers have found a way to measure it.
Scientists at the University of Arizona have developed a tool to analyse how people actually speak to their pets during everyday life.
And it turns out we talk to them quite a lot.
Researchers found that about one-tenth of the total time pet owners spend talking is spent speaking to their pets. They also found significant differences in the way individual owners communicate with their animals.
The findings could eventually help researchers understand why having a pet appears to benefit the well-being of some people more than others.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, is a collaboration between the University of Arizona College of Veterinary Medicine and Department of Psychology.
Meet AURAL-Pet
The new tool is called AURAL-Pet, short for Audio-based Understanding of Relational Animal-directed Language.
Think of it as a checklist for the different ways humans communicate with their animals.
It identifies interactions including praise, questions, commands and frustration.
Instead of relying on questionnaires asking owners to describe their relationships with their pets, researchers analysed real-life audio recordings of people interacting with their animals while going about their normal routines.
The aim was to get objective information about what actually happens between people and their pets at home.
“So many people who own a pet say, ‘I know this pet makes a difference in my life,’ and yet the studies keep coming up mixed,” said Dr Emily Bray, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine. “We need objective data on what people are actually saying and how they are interacting with their pets to begin exploring why.”
“We hope AURAL-Pet can be used in future studies to understand how differences in these interaction styles map onto mental health and well-being outcomes in humans,” said Dara Jonkoski, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology.
No two pet owners talk exactly alike
The recordings revealed major differences in how people interact with their animals.
Some participants, for example, referred to their pets by a nickname in all their recorded pet-talk clips.
Others never used a nickname.
Those differences could help researchers investigate the long-standing idea of the “pet effect”, which suggests pets positively influence human health.
Some studies have linked pet ownership with less loneliness and depression, while others have found little or no effect.
Understanding what people actually do with their pets, rather than simply whether they own one, could provide researchers with another way to examine those differences.
How researchers listened without influencing behaviour
One of the challenges when studying relationships between people and pets is getting participants to behave naturally.
If you know scientists are studying the way you talk to your dog, chances are you might suddenly become much more aware of what you say to your dog.
To get around this, the researchers used the electronically activated recorder, or EAR.
The smartphone application, developed by co-author Matthias Mehl, a professor in the Department of Psychology, switched on at random moments throughout the day and recorded what was happening around each participant.
Participants consented to being recorded but did not know the research question would focus on pets.
“Very often in human-animal interaction studies, people sign up knowing the topic of the study is their relationship with their pets,” Bray said. “So, right off the bat, you have a bit of a biased sample. In that regard, our study is as unbiased as it can get.”
More than 5,000 recordings analysed
The team identified 5,072 sound clips from four archival EAR machines in which a dog or cat could either be heard or was mentioned.
The recordings came from 240 participants.
Two human coders then independently scored the same clips using AURAL-Pet.
Of the system’s 23 yes-or-no variables, 22 proved reliable between the coders.
Researchers also designed the system to capture interactions that could potentially explain some of the benefits associated with pets.
These include situations where having a pet starts a conversation with another person or when an owner treats their animal as a confidant.
“We hear a lot of really interesting things, like someone coming home from a rough day at work and telling their pet, ‘You’re always glad to see me – you always make me feel so good’,” Jonkoski said.
And suddenly all those one-sided conversations you’ve been having with your dog don’t seem quite so strange.
What happens next?
Researchers are now applying AURAL-Pet to the C.A.R.E study, which collects mental health and well-being information from adults over 60.
The tool could help them investigate how conversations and interactions with pets relate to the well-being of older people.
For Bray, one of its biggest advantages is the ability to examine what people actually do rather than relying solely on what owners say they do.
“We can get straight to human behaviour, which I love as an animal behaviour researcher,” Bray said. “Humans are animals, too, right?”
So the next time you find yourself giving your cat a detailed account of your day or asking your dog a question they definitely aren’t going to answer, remember: scientists are finally interested in those conversations too.
Leave a comment